Cockroaches and Feral Hogs

For about 10 years, I lived in a variety of apartments in New York City. One particular fleabag was roach infested. Any time of day, you could look in any direction and see hundreds of the creatures scurrying across the floor, up the walls, and across the kitchen table. Each night, I would come home to find my toothbrush wrapped carefully in a plastic baggy – and covered with cockroaches. Sometimes, we would abandon the apartment and light a roach bomb. All of our guests would flee the room and end up somewhere else, but then our neighbor would do his own bombing, and they would all be back.

Sadly, that’s how some people think about immigration law. It’s called “attrition through enforcement,” and you’ll often hear people like Kris Kobach invoke it on television as if it is some kind of humane middle measure to deal with the immigration problem. Recently, one of Kansas’ own state representatives opined that the way to deal with illegal immigration in Kansas might be to shoot them from airplanes like “feral hogs.”

Mr. Peck no doubt intended the comment as a joke, but Mr. Peck’s bushelful of nonsense nevertheless revealed some thought that was really going on in his heart – that immigrants here illegally are no better than animals trespassing the farm, and should be treated the same way.

This, of course, depends on how you define the problem. If you see illegal immigrants as people who are lawbreakers, welfare takers, lazy, criminals, etc. then the law that you imagine solving the problem is one that does its best to drive them out of your state and somewhere else – like roaches to the next apartment. If you see them as hardworking, poor, moral, churchgoing, with significant ties here such as family and jobs, then you imagine a law that tries to find a way to help them get legal.

Our present law doesn’t do that. It takes good people who have overwhelming, long ties here – ties that would have warranted a clear path to legal immigration in the past – and dashes their hopes against a wall of illegality.

In times like these, our highest moral goal is not the unthinking service to an unjust law, but our highest moral goal is to see the law changed. I think it’s helpful to revisit the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., in his letter from that Birmingham jail in the midst of the civil rights movement:

“There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

Now consider where our current immigration laws fall on that spectrum.